


an old happiness

by maketea



Series: the ways you said i love you [5]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alcohol, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Identity Reveal, Kissing, these kid just deserve happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23266780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maketea/pseuds/maketea
Summary: ladybug is handling her breakup with chat noir about as well as he is.**(terribly.)(prompt 5 = over a beer bottle)
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Series: the ways you said i love you [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667194
Comments: 55
Kudos: 610





	an old happiness

“Never thought I’d see the day Ladybug drinks on a weeknight.” Chat Noir moved the indigo box of lager aside so he could sit next to her. “You’re either celebrating, or something’s wrong.”

She laughed bitterly around her sip. “Take a guess.”

Bottoms up. So she couldn’t see the way he looked at her.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and, without looking (at the box but more importantly  _ him _ ), wrestled out another bottle.

Ladybug held it out for him. He took it.

“Which is it for you?” she asked, looking up at the sky and hearing his bottle hiss open. “Did the cat finally get the cream?”

Chat Noir chuckled, and swallowed down a gulp. “You used to say that every time you kissed me.”

Her tone turned acerbic. “I really don’t want to talk about kissing you, right now.”

“Right.” He toyed with the bottle cap. “Sorry.”

Bottoms up — both of them, this time.

Tikki told Marinette off for her self-destructive endeavours. But there she was with a six-pack of Kronenbourg and her ex-boyfriend.

She was sure the latter was killing her the quickest.

Still looking at the sky, Ladybug sighed, and rested her head on his shoulder.

“They found new tenants for our room.” Just saying it made tears spring up to her eyes. She rubbed at her lashes perfunctorily. 

“Oh?” he said. His fist tightened on the bottle. “Who has it now?”

“Some couple, I think. Older than us.”

“You think they’ll change the mattress?”

“God, I hope so.”

For the first time that evening, she lifted her head to him. They gazed at each other for a moment, then laughed.

Lager bottle in hand, Chat Noir wrapped his arm around her, and kissed the top of her head. “Remember that time I spilled tea all over the bed sheets?”

She smiled. Of course she did. Even now, whenever she sat undressed at the lip of the bathtub and waited for it to fill, Marinette traced the burn mark on her thigh. 

“That was awful. I still don’t know why you thought you could balance a cup on the bed,” she said.

“Neither. I wasn’t really thinking that evening.”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes, still smiling, reliving an old happiness. “Neither was I.”

The apartment was cheap, which was the only reason she had agreed to it. They split the rent, using it as their own makeshift infirmary for when they came out of battles worse for wear.

But then they grew up, grew into a relationship infused with hormones, and their heat packs and cold compresses were quickly supplanted by each other’s arms.

He had spilled that tea on their first night together, at one o’clock in the morning, when they were still bright-eyed and wide-smiled and sore-lipped from talking and giggling and kissing. She remembered jerking away when the tea fell on her naked thigh, and blinking away reactionary tears as she laughed, and thinking she would never be happier than this.

Ladybug took a long, long swig of lager. She was no longer smiling.

“I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said.

He froze. Slowly, he tried prying the bottle out of her hands. “Not after you’ve been drinking.”

“No, no, I have to tell you, it’s eating me up.” She wrenched the bottle away from him. Lager sloshed onto her lap.

“Ladybug—”

“I still love you.”

“Ladybug, we can’t—”

“I love you so, so much.”

“Please—”

“I love you so much and it feels like I’m dying.”

Chat Noir inhaled shakily. “We can’t.”

“Don’t you see?” She looked up at him. Her eyes were hot, burning, blurred with tears. “I can’t do  _ this _ anymore. I can’t just… go back to normal.”

“But you… we… our identities…” He bit his lip, and looked up, gaze hooded by his pinched brow. “You said it yourself, Bugaboo. We both deserve to fall in love with someone… feasible.”

And she was barely listening, because the tears were streaming down her cheeks, because he hadn’t called her  _ Bugaboo _ in so very, very long.

“Is it that you don’t love me anymore?” she asked, holding his stare. “Say it,” she spat. “Say,  _ Ladybug, I don’t love you anymore, _ and I’ll stop. We'll go back to normal."

His chest quivered, and his eyes turned glassy under the moonlight.

_ “You’re gonna hate me for this,” Ladybug said, on her knees in front of him, tipping the mouth of the rubbing alcohol into some bunched up cloth. _

_ He hissed when she put it against the cut on his forearm and clung to the edge of the mattress, but managed a smile all the same. “You know I’ll love you forever, My Lady,” _

Chat Noir swallowed. He was crying, too.

He took her face in his hands. “I love you.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “Which is why I want you to be with someone you can have a future with.”

“Why can’t I have a future with you?”

“Our identities—”

She smacked his hands away. “To hell with identities.” Ladybug picked her bottle back up and finished it off, wiping alcohol and tears off her jaw. “We’re in  _ love. _ That’s all that matters.”

He hesitated. “You— you’ve been drinking, our identities are important, you don’t really want to—”

“I do, I do, I do.” She climbed into his lap, cradled his head, wept onto his cheeks. “I’m nineteen years old.”

“Ladybug…”

“I live on top of a bakery. I go to ESMOD.”

With a trembling hand, Chat Noir covered Ladybug's mouth.

She lowered it, and he didn’t resist. “I make all of my own clothes. I have a sewing machine with ladybug stickers on it because my best friend had leftovers from when she was decorating her room.”

Chat Noir said nothing, worrying at his lips, hands moving to touch her cheeks, her hair, her ears.

“I-I love to bake. Actually, everything from the  _ Tom & Sabine Patisserie Boulangerie  _ that I got you was either baked by me, my mum, or my dad.”

She knew that would be the swing to hammer the nail on the head. Chat Noir's eyes widened.

Ladybug kissed his stunned face over and over and over again. "My name's Marinette Dupain-Cheng," she confessed, "and I'm so painfully in love with you."

She pressed one last kiss to his chin, then stayed there, crying.

Chat Noir didn't move.

A gust of wind came and toppled Ladybug's beer bottle. She was breathing, he was breathing, the beer bottle rattling around the rooftop.

"Marinette," he whispered into her hair. "Oh, God, Marinette."

And he hugged her, and she gasped, and pulled up her head to look at him with swollen, throbbing eyes.

"Marinette." He touched her cheek. "Marinette."

And he kissed her.

He kissed her hard and feverishly, a culmination of every moment they could have touched since their breakup but didn't. Ladybug tasted lager and tears and Chat Noir, and she went back so many times the first two were almost gone.

"Tell me," she breathed, cupping his face, "tell me who you are."

"Adrien," he said, and kissed her again. "Adrien.  _ Your _ Adrien."


End file.
